India T20I Most sixes in an innings: Match Records

India have twice hit 23 sixes in a men's T20 international innings, and the two occasions were separated by fourteen months and a hemisphere. The first was at the Wanderers in Johannesburg on 15 November 2024, when only three India batters got to the middle: Tilak Varma finished on 120 from 47 balls, Sanju Samson on 109 from 56, and Abhishek Sharma made 36 before being dismissed. India closed on 283 for 1. When it was set, that was the largest number of sixes any Full Member side had hit in a T20 international innings.

The second came at the Greenfield International Stadium in Thiruvananthapuram on 31 January 2026, against New Zealand, and it was the opposite kind of innings: five batters hit at least one six, Ishan Kishan made 103 from 43 balls, and the total was 271 for 5.

Below is every India innings in which the team reached fifteen sixes. There are eleven, and nine of them have come since the start of 2024.

India's most sixes in a T20I innings

Sixes	India total	Fours	Opponent	Venue	Date	Result
23	283/1	17	South Africa	Wanderers, Johannesburg	15 Nov 2024	Won by 135 runs
23	271/5	17	New Zealand	Greenfield Stadium, Thiruvananthapuram	31 Jan 2026	Won by 46 runs
22	297/6	25	Bangladesh	Rajiv Gandhi Stadium, Hyderabad	12 Oct 2024	Won by 133 runs
21	260/5	21	Sri Lanka	Holkar Stadium, Indore	22 Dec 2017	Won by 88 runs
19	253/7	18	England	Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai	5 Mar 2026	Won by 7 runs
19	247/9	17	England	Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai	2 Feb 2025	Won by 150 runs
18	255/5	19	New Zealand	Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad	8 Mar 2026	Won by 96 runs
17	256/4	17	Zimbabwe	Chepauk, Chennai	26 Feb 2026	Won by 72 runs
16	240/3	19	West Indies	Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai	11 Dec 2019	Won by 67 runs
15	221/9	17	Bangladesh	Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi	9 Oct 2024	Won by 86 runs
15	205/5	14	Australia	Gros Islet, St Lucia	24 Jun 2024	Won by 24 runs

Five further innings have produced fourteen sixes: against South Africa at Delhi in June 2022, Sri Lanka at Rajkot in January 2023, Zimbabwe at Harare in July 2024, New Zealand at Nagpur in January 2026 and Namibia at Delhi in February 2026.

From thirteen to twenty-three in seven steps

The team record has moved only seven times in the twenty years since India's first T20 international.

Sehwag and Tendulkar's India hit three sixes in that first match at Johannesburg in December 2006. Five came against Pakistan at Kingsmead in the opening game of the 2007 World Twenty20. Eleven came three days later against England at the same ground, in the innings that contained Yuvraj Singh's over off Stuart Broad. Thirteen came at Christchurch in February 2009, when Suresh Raina made 61 with five sixes and Virender Sehwag hit four in a ten-ball 26.

Then the record sat at thirteen for eight years and ten months. It took the Indore innings of December 2017 — Rohit Sharma's 118 from 43 balls and KL Rahul's 89, with eighteen sixes between the two of them — to move it to 21. Twenty-two followed at Hyderabad in October 2024, and 23 at Johannesburg five weeks after that.

The gap between 2009 and 2017 is the interesting part. India played 78 T20 internationals in that stretch, and none of them produced more than twelve sixes.

An innings played by three men

The Johannesburg innings is unlike anything else in this list. Abhishek Sharma was dismissed in the fourth over for 36 from 18 balls, and no India batter came in after him. Tilak Varma and Samson batted the remaining sixteen and a bit overs and were both unbeaten, with ten and nine sixes respectively.

The consequence is a distribution no other 20-plus innings shares: 19 of the 23 sixes came from two bats. South Africa's reply of 148 lost by 135 runs, and the total remains India's largest away from home, and their second highest anywhere. The Tilak Varma profile covers the run of form that produced it — two hundreds in three innings on that tour.

The same number, spread across five batters

Thiruvananthapuram in January 2026 got to 23 by a different route. Ishan Kishan hit ten sixes in 103 from 43 balls, Suryakumar Yadav six in 63 from 30, Hardik Pandya four in 42 from 17, Abhishek Sharma two and Shivam Dube one. New Zealand replied with 225, which made the match aggregate 496 — one of the highest in which India have played, and covered on the highest match aggregates page.

An innings of 271 that concedes five wickets is a different kind of achievement from 283 for 1, and the six count being identical is a reminder that this record measures one specific thing well and everything else badly.

Thirteen from one bat

The largest number of sixes any India batter has hit in a T20 international innings is thirteen, by Abhishek Sharma in his 135 from 54 balls against England at the Wankhede on 2 February 2025. India made 247 for 9 in that match and won by 150 runs, the second-largest margin by runs in their T20I history behind a 168-run win over New Zealand at Ahmedabad in February 2023.

That innings sits fifth on the team list with nineteen sixes, and it illustrates the difference between the two records. The team record needs several batters going at once; the individual record needs one batter surviving. Only four other India innings have contained ten sixes from a single player: Rohit at Indore, Samson at Kingsmead in November 2024, Tilak at Johannesburg, and Kishan at Thiruvananthapuram. In three of those four the team also broke or equalled its own record, which is not a coincidence — the largest team counts almost all rest on one batter reaching a very quick hundred. More on that innings and the batter who played it is on the Abhishek Sharma profile.

Sixes per innings, by period

The record innings are outliers. The underlying rate is the more useful number, and it has not moved in a straight line. The table below counts every India innings of at least thirty balls — the threshold excludes rain-shortened fragments, where a handful of deliveries would distort the average.

Period	India innings	Sixes	Sixes per innings	Runs per innings
2006–2011	29	162	5.6	155
2012–2016	45	176	3.9	148
2017–2020	57	376	6.6	167
2021–2023	75	539	7.2	167
2024–2026	65	582	9.0	177

The dip through 2012 to 2016 is real, not a rounding artefact. India's T20 side in those years was built around Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma accumulating at a strike rate near 130 with Yuvraj Singh and Raina in decline, and the average score fell to 148 an innings. The recovery from 2017 tracks the arrival of a middle order — Pandya, Rishabh Pant, later Suryakumar Yadav — picked specifically to hit sixes.

The 2024 to 2026 figure of nine sixes an innings is the highest of any period, and it comes with the highest average score. It also comes with more wickets: India's most recent era hits more sixes and loses more batters doing it.

Where the big innings happen

Three of the eleven innings were played at the Wankhede, which is the only ground to appear more than once. The rest are spread across Indore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Johannesburg and Gros Islet. Ground records for the Mumbai venue, including its unusually short straight boundaries, sit on the Wankhede Stadium records page.

Nine of the eleven were made in India. That is partly a scheduling artefact — India play most of their T20 internationals at home — but the two overseas entries are worth noting: Johannesburg is a high-altitude ground where the ball carries, and Gros Islet in the 2024 T20 World Cup was a slow surface on which 205 was a very large score.

By opponent: England and New Zealand and Bangladesh appear twice each, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, West Indies and Australia once each. Two of the eleven came against England at the same ground, sixteen months apart. Both are covered on the India versus England T20I record page.

Four things worth drawing out

India have never lost a T20 international in which they hit fifteen or more sixes. The only defeat in any of the sixteen innings with fourteen or more is against South Africa at Delhi in June 2022, when India made 211 for 4 with fourteen sixes and South Africa chased it down with an over to spare.

Eight of the eleven innings came in the seventeen months from October 2024 to March 2026 — a period that included a home series against England, a heavy run of home white-ball cricket and the 2026 T20 World Cup, which India won on their own grounds. Twelve of the sixteen innings with fourteen or more sixes fall in 2024, 2025 and 2026.

The highest six count and the highest total are not the same innings. India's 297 for 6 against Bangladesh at Hyderabad, their highest T20I team total, came with 22 sixes and 25 fours — the most fours of any innings in this table. Getting to 297 required both, which is the point: the very largest totals come from boundary hitting of both kinds rather than sixes alone, as the most fours in an innings list shows from the other direction.

The record is now genuinely hard to move. Twenty-three sixes in twenty overs means better than one every five deliveries across the whole innings, sustained through the loss of wickets and the two or three overs in which even the best modern T20 sides do not score. The broader arc of how India got to this point — from the 2007 title to a side that treats 250 as reachable — is set out in the history of India's T20 internationals and in the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Six counts on this page are computed from public ball-by-ball records of men's T20 internationals involving India, covering every such match from December 2006 to those completed before 1 August 2026. A six is counted where six runs were credited to the batter off a single delivery; boundaries that arose from overthrows or from extras are not counted as sixes, which is the same basis on which official scorecards record them.

The era table uses a qualification threshold of thirty balls faced in the innings. Without it, an abandoned match in which India faced four deliveries would count as a full innings and drag the average down.

Totals, margins and individual scores are as recorded in the match scorecards. The claim that the Johannesburg innings held the record for the most sixes by a Full Member side in a T20 international is as reported at the time of that match; the outright T20 international record for team sixes is higher and was set in a match between Associate sides. Figures on this page are current to 19 August 2026, and a record of this kind should be expected to move.